


swing like a pendulum (kick like you mean it)

by superbayern



Category: Football RPF, Real Person Fiction
Genre: M/M, bayern in general, honestly the worst thing i've ever written, just an accurate representation, of bayern rn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-23 14:36:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10721292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superbayern/pseuds/superbayern
Summary: In which Thomas Muller is stuck in the fulcrum between psychological disaster and blasé humor, and Joshua Kimmich compulsively haunts the sidelines of the green.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is a work in progress--I just can't figure out how to make it show up as multichaptered :^)
> 
> Apologies for the English in advance, but please do leave suggestions!

The first time Joshua Kimmich meets Thomas Muller, he is greeted with a hearty slap on the chest and a firm handshake. “The very first to announce Basti’s departure,” he howls into an empty locker room, flashing absurdly long canines. “Welcome to Bayern, Kid.”

There’s something about walking alongside Thomas Muller in the sterile white halls of an empty Saebener Strasse compact, something that exudes confidence and warmth, something that feels a bit like home. 

That’s a deception though, as Josh soon finds out himself in pre-season, because Josh is not Bavarian, and he has never known Bayern with its beating and bleeding heart, and it’s disconcerting to see the giant void left by the Fussballgott manifested in every discerning eye that turns his way. 

No, Josh knows, Bayern is not home, not yet, not to him. 

Living in Munich, stepping onto this Bavarian pitch is akin to feeling adrift in the midst of giants, and here at Bayern, giants there are. Despite that, Douglas, Josh’s fellow arrival, takes to the club quickly, pledging his heart to its turgid trudge towards trophies. A bit too quickly, Josh thinks to himself, as he reminds himself to breath in the tight red jersey and forget the way this unfamiliar insignia burns on his sternum.

But it’s a different kind of burn when he watches his teammates start the first game of the season, against Wolfsburg. 

The season starts and Thomas is on fire, slotting in goal after goal and living up to his Mr. Million Dollar name as taunts are flung in the direction of England, and Bayern scintillates. Josh watches from the sidelines and paces them until he knows that it takes one hundred and twenty three steps from the Südkurve to the visitor's side and that the loneliest view is right behind Manuel, but when Boateng and Badstuber and Benatia spend long hours with the physician and Pep turns a calculating eye toward Josh, he would gladly onto the beautiful, beautiful green. Or so he tells Pep.

Time stalls for no one, and Josh is struck with a sense of vertigo, an overwhelming flood of hypersensitivity, as he lines up to climb the steps of the Allianz for the first time. For the first time since joining this club, in his life? he falters, but then, in front of him, Thomas cackles gleefully and pats his child escort's head a bit too hard, and suppressing a grin, Josh follows him.

Under Pep, he finds himself side by side with the greats of the club- a silent Philipp, a moody Manuel, and a brooding Jerome, and Josh realizes that maybe, just maybe, the greats are just as lost as he is. But then, Thomas manages to slip and flail his way into any doubts Josh entertains. Thomas, the saliency to this covenant of Bayern, and though the Bayern jersey goes over his head a little, easier and it welds to his skin a little quicker, Josh still feels alone as Thomas is quite content to blabber on about the pigeon population in Munich, and Joshua just tries not to lose himself in the refractions of light off Thomas’s smile.

It's so easy to dismiss Thomas as a very loud component of the background noise, but at the same time, Josh can't help but feel there is definitely something more, something deceptively deeper, to Thomas Muller.

Then Thomas trips over nothing in particular and manages to tear Philipp's portrait on the dressing room wall with a flailing hand, and surely, Josh tells himself, there can't be anything. 

Under Pep, Josh shines, but Pep will leave and the Italian will come in, but for now, the campaign must be won for the Spaniard. He plays against Juventus, witnesses the incredible comeback, but he also plays against Atletico, and when Thomas misses his penalty, everything about the ebullient Thomas who wears his heart on his sleeve and quite frankly acts an asshole on the green seems to shatter.  
Joshua hasn’t been disillusioned--no, but despite the lanky gallop and crinkled, twinkling eyes, Thomas experiences guilt for the first time. 

Perhaps it was unfair, Joshua ponders, for him to shoulder the blame of the match, but that’s football, and Thomas does have strong shoulders indeed. All the same, there’s heartbreak after the final whistle, but it’s tainted with the modicum of expectancy. After all, the semis are as far as any Bayern team will go under Pep, but to Josh, it’s the first bereavement of this degree, and to Thomas, it’s the first time the Südkurve doesn't scream his name.

Most importantly, it's the first time Joshua sees Thomas without a smile on his face, and he realizes Thomas looks too old to be 27, only five years older than himself, but perhaps a part of that is the due part of being the soul of a club.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Writing this instead of studying for the 4 exams I have next week!! Great life decisions :')
> 
> Again, please excuse the grammar!! I'm trying...

Pep leaves on an overcast Sunday, quietly and without fanfare. This is a man who has fallen in love with a club, Josh thinks, and it is neither this one nor the next one. He supposes he owes the Spaniard some thanks, more gratitude than he can muster for clothing him in red and newly in white, so they have lunch together in silence.

Josh will go to France and Pep to rainy England, and he wants nothing more than to ask the middle-aged tactician, how does it feel to discard a club like a skin? More importantly, he years to ask him, how do you fall in love with a club?

“When you are the club,” Pep answers though Josh is almost sure he hasn’t said anything aloud. “When you can feel every dream and every heartbreak like it’s your own.” 

“Did you love Bayern?” Josh asks even though he knows the answer. Pep lets his mouth twist into a melancholic smile and swirls his scotch. He doesn’t reply. “Have you ever loved a club?” Josh knows he’s asking questions he knows the answers to, but Josh is desperate to find some parallel between him and the Spaniard with mercury eyes and a decisive future. “Do you want me to come to Manchester?” he tries again.

“I think,” Pep says slowly, dragging each accented word on the peaks of his tongue, “that perhaps you ought to ask Thomas all three.”

Josh goes to Paris first. 

There are giants in France and a restlessness to the country that clings to Josh’s skin. It is bright here, brighter than Munich, and there are many, many more eyes, but there are also reminders from Josh’s past, an exuberant Julian, an ambitious Leroy, and a determined Jonathan. 

There are congratulations for Toni who left Bayern before Basti and long before Josh, and then there is Bastian himself, bearing the paleness of England in the backs of his wrists and planes of his face, and Josh has to remind himself that this is the man who once wore the heart of a club and left it to find his own.

How did he becomes a great? With the flippancy to parallel Thomas, how did both of them amble and joke their way into the ranks of the legends? Josh wonders, thinking it to be the greatest, most guarded secret of this generation’s football. 

Then Josh turns a discerning eye to Thomas and while he radiates incognizance and vitality, Josh sees the solemnity in his eyes as he shirks penalty duties and spends longer in the pent walls of his hotel when none watch, and perhaps, Josh acknowledges, there truly is something more to this Thomas than he knows.

France shines and Josh shines just a little dimmer in a position Pep’s creative delicacies would have died to place him in, but he shines nonetheless, and he wants to call the old Spaniard and ask, is this how it feels to love a team? He doesn’t get the chance. 

As this team stumbles into the quarterfinals, there are millions of eyes on a right foot as it comes down onto the stitching of the ball amidst flailing arms, and then there comes a collective sigh that ripples though his teammates, through the stadium, perhaps through France, through Germany with which Thomas’s gangly figure seems to crumple, and as he stands shoulder to shoulder with his teammates, Josh comes to realize that the Euros may have broken Thomas Muller a little more.

Then, Thomas straightens and strolls back to a taught string of white jerseys and grass stains with a familiar smile and stadium lights winking off his canines, and surely, Josh tells himself, this was just another Thomas thing-- evanescent and insignificant. 

He finds Thomas after the game against France alone in his room, looking a million years older than twenty-seven. For a moment, all is silent, tense as Josh tiptoes around the pity sloshing around in the half-empty beer on the night stand. 

“If you dwell on the past, you’ll never get around to making the future that you want,” Thomas says first, eyes glittering in the dim lamplight. “Next season” he says, making it sound like a promise.  
“Next season,” Josh echos, unsure of his meaning.

“You were quite the player here,” Thomas says absentmindedly, like he’s already thinking of the pigeons back in Munich. “Now, we put everything past us and focus on next season.”

Josh sees dozens of missed chances replayed in filmy, blue eyes, sees the twist of Thomas’s mouth, and repeats his words. “Next season.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And the last chapter a day before my last exam! This one was definitely the hardest to write...

Ancelotti is of a different species--not quite as alien as Pep, but not quite normal, Josh learns in the early days at Saebener Strasse. This man moves leisurely at his own place, chooses to skim over the beloved tiki taka, and turns Robert and Arjen and Thiago loose. 

He cages Joshua.

There is something mercurial in those eyes, a flighty, faithless look which punctures Josh whenever he casts an eye to him. The Italian is less passionate than Pep, and Pep is the only standard that Josh can hold him to because it's blaringly obvious that this team has no direction, that it's held together by the desperate runs of Arjen or Franck or Xabi, and Josh knows he can run faster.  
Ancelotti doesn't.

This team is an aged team on faltering legs, and Josh is an aging boy, so after every game on the sidelines of the green, he can't feel guilty casting an eye towards England and tacit promises, abandoned.  
Bayern doesn't falter, albeit trudging a bit slower towards the title, and Thomas, soulful Thomas, warms the bench next to Josh on the coldest Munich nights, eyes glowing with primitive understanding of the game as they follow the ball.

Thomas doesn't play, and when he does, the ball avoids the net with a startling consistency, and in the locker rooms, the player canvases stay untorn, the milieu silent. Josh wonders if it's possible for a man to change his constituency in a year or if this was simply the Thomas kept behind a thick veneer of pretty words.

This Thomas bleeds frustration, pent up energy and confusion and a wistfulness of the beautiful game. Josh bleeds desperation and a wavering determination, and a pall seems to collect over the two with an ominous portent.

Secretly, Josh thinks that from their blanketed span on the bench, they radiate enough discontent to color the crimson air grey. 

They lose to Real in the red, bleeding Allianz without Robert, without Mats, and Hargreaves insightfully points out the many, many woes of poor, poor Thomas. 

Madrid has been too cruel to a hapless Thomas, Josh thinks, and maybe he never did have the time or the disposition to mend after Atletico, after France, and now, Bayern teeters between falling out of Europe and making a miraculous comeback, and Thomas teeters too. 

They don't have enough feel for the green to cling to their berth, and this team has a thinly-veiled furiousity to it, a fragile tension as the whispers of a semifinal sour into defeat in the quarters.

Arturo and Thiago are righteously furious, burning with a passion absent on this Spanish pitch, smoldering with the rage of being robbed. Manu and Mats wallow in concealed pain, and Josh knows these are men who have given it their all and ultimately came up short. 

As for Thomas, Josh forces his way into a dark hotel room where he exudes more pity than the atmosphere can hold when Joshua slumps down next to him on a stained carpet floor, and for a rare moment, Thomas doesn't move to fill the air with careless words. 

“I think I understand,” Josh says to himself, studying the crevices and freckling planes of Thomas’s tanned face. He lets his sight arch against the ridges of those bright eyeteeth and slink through the crinkles framing the absence of a habitual smile which tells the story of a man amongst men who have suffered. 

Thomas with his impossible hearing turns with a ghost of a ghost of that achingly familiar smile that looks so out of place in the debris of their loss and shadowed eyes from a sleepless night.   
How many of those did you spend agonizing over this club? Josh wants to ask. Over yourself? Perhaps they are the same thing, Josh thinks.

“Understand what?” Thomas asks instead, meeting his eyes, and in those eyes, Josh sees Chelsea blue against a Munich sky, red hearts in Wembley, legends who have passed onto different worlds distinct from this Bavarian one, the bleeding heart of a club as it falters in Europe for four excruciating years. In his eyes, Josh sees a Bernabeu sea which carries humiliation and denial. Perhaps they deserved to win tonight, with the unfinished words in their tongues, for Philipp, for Xabi, for the sake of Thomas whose heart has imploded with this loss.

But most importantly, Josh sees the blue and white diamonds of Munich tattooed across his arms, the rich red banner of Bayern wrapped around his thin, spindly calves, and the legends that Josh has never gotten to meet, embodied in the flashes of his smile. He sees 2013 and Brazil and glittering trophies bright enough to rival his smile, and Josh realizes that this is not the end; it could not be.

Because this, Josh thinks, this man and not Basti, not Xavi of Barcelona, not Gerrard of Liverpool, is a heart of the club, and in every misplaced pass and every embarrassingly awkward move, Josh can see the life blood of Thomas Muller, tainted with the dream of a club, and as long as Thomas drew breath, this team would too.

Because Josh came to this cold Southern city to learn from the soul of a club, but he now knows that it was not Schweinsteiger, the beloved Schweinsteiger now off in a city much warmer than this one, who bled red. 

It was glib, carefree Thomas to whom he shifts closer, to whose shoulders he presses hesitant, artless kisses to, whose jugular pulses erratically as Josh mouths at it, whose eyes gleam ferally in the dark, foreign hotel room as they gaze down at Josh. 

“What it means to love a club,” Josh finally replies with a heaving chest and a heavy heart.


End file.
